This morning I hopped on a jetBlue flight from Austin to San Francisco to attend Google I/O. I usually avoid industry conferences, but I make it a point to attend this one. I find it has a supernormal signal-to-noise ratio. Here's what I expect to get out of this year's event.
Exposure
We're getting close to the commercial release of Spanning Backup, so it's time to start directing people's attention toward it. (We recently performed our two-millionth backup. Time to light this candle!) Toward that end, here's a quick video showing what it's all about:
Information
We work at the leading edge of Google's API's, so there's often information we need that's not documented anywhere. What's the maximum payload size for an HTTP POST to the Google Docs API? How do you enable compression when talking to the Google Calendar API? Is Google planning on implementing contact sharing, or would it be a good thing for us to do? The answers to these questions are at I/O, not online.
Relationships
It's important to remember that there are real people creating all of these ecosystems, companies, products, and features. And even though better online communications tools exist now than ever before, face-to-face conversation (often in a conference hallway or a hotel bar) is the most powerful way to establish and strengthen relationships with those people.
Zeitgeist
Finally, I want to get a sense of where Google and its ecosystem are going. From where I sit it looks like Google is emphasizing Android over the web, a strategy I would consider dangerous and ill-advised. I want to see if I get the same sense at the show.
Oh Yeah, and a Party!
Be sure to join us and our friends at RedMonk for beers at House of Shields Wednesday night. The first $500 of the bar tab is on Spanning!
But even if you can't make it Wednesday night, please come by the Spanning booth in the Developer Sandbox area and say hello. We have some very exclusive laptop stockers for you. :-)
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